Almost 17 years after the fatal Malegaon bomb explosion, which left six people dead and over 100 people wounded, a special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court is expected to pronounce its judgment on Thursday. It was carried out in Malegaon, a communally sensitive town in Maharashtra, on September 29, 2008, when an explosive device strapped to a motorcycle exploded, killing eleven people near a mosque, during the holy month of Ramzan, just before the Navratri festival.
The case saw the trial of seven people, which included Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Member of Parliament Pragya Singh Thakur, Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit, Major (retired) Ramesh Upadhyay, Ajay Rahirkar, Sudhakar Dwivedi, Sudhakar Chaturvedi, and Sameer Kulkarni. They faced a case under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and various provisions of the Indian Penal Code, which include criminal conspiracy, murder, and attempt to murder, and the attempt to rail certain religious groups to incite enmity among religious groups.
The trial commenced in the year 2018 after the charges were framed and culminated on April 19, 2025, when the court reserved the judgment. In 2011, the case was given to the NIA, which had replaced the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), and they maintained that the explosion was part of a greater conspiracy to terrify a section of the Muslim community, in order to disrupt peace, and also challenge the security of the state.
The prosecutors brought 323 witnesses to stand in the trial, but 37 of them turned against them. In its closing arguments, the NIA highlighted the fact that it had created an entire chain of evidence to show the guilt of the accused.
In the defense statement, Pragya Thakur said that the implication was illegal and of malicious intention. Because of this, the verdict that is now awaited is at a sensitive point where one of India’s most high-profile terror cases is concerned.
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